The major issue in this is not the bot/automated process that initially flagged the video (although I don't agree with that either).

The primary issue is that the appeal process was rejected. This shows that either all appeals are rejected outright or the person who was physically responsible for checking it didn't read the appeal or view the video.

I'm not sure how anyone could reasonably assume "this is me personally performing a 300yo song" - either by reading the appeal notes or viewing the video could assume that it breached copyright.

This is why there needs to be damages / fines for all incorrect appeal rejections. Because if there's no penalty for getting it wrong, there is no motivation for a company to actually do anything about it.

If it costs them $1000 - $10,000 for getting it wrong, it will be more cost effective for them to pay someone $20/h to double check before rejecting an appeal.

Somebody presented the idea here on HN the other day about $1 fines - both for individuals and for the music copyright abusers.

The nice thing about this IMO is 1$ is a small amount for me and you, but for a big corporation like sony this will cost them thousands every time it gets invoked (because legal will probably get involved).

Of course it needs to be slightly more advanced I guess but it would be a good start.

Private groups can levy fines. They can raise the costs of ads for these publishers on their platform, take a portion of the revenue from their content, or simply cease doing business with them until it's paid.

There is a large amount of piracy which gets legitimately flagged. It's unfair to ask copyright holders to perpetually "loan" millions of dollars to hosters, which is what this scheme would effectively enforce.

"It is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer". That's been a theoretical basis of the criminal justice system (or at least something it claims to aspire towards).

The argument that lots of crime happens and it's difficult to make sure that efforts to police the law only target the guilty doesn't hold up under that. We're not meant to bias towards punishing a few innocent people because of that difficulty.

How large a block should be could be a difficult thing to judge. Perhaps a bock could just be all the reports made in one day. Perhaps let the reporter chose: if anything in a given block of reports is rejected then they all are and need reporting again, this would make the reporter group the definite infringements together but be more cautious with the more spurious/speculative reports. Though a concern with any system like that is implementation and UI/API complexities.

It'd cost more than you'd likely recover. Even a video with a lot (1M+) of hits only generates a few hundred to a few thousand dollars of revenue (depends on how many of those users skip the ads basically).

Might be worth trying to put together a class action suit for all of the people that this keeps happening to... but again, the recovery would likely go primarily to the legal firm, though it might be enough to get Google to wake up and do something about their auto-rejecting appeals system.

Can you file against Sony in your local county when the problem happened via an international company like Facebook or Google, rather than at your local airport? I have no idea, but I'd like it if there really were a simple, and cost-effective way for the little guy to throw some rocks at Goliath now and then in egregious cases like this.

"county" isn't the same word as "country". In the US, you bring small claims suits in a county court...county is very localized, and there are thousands of them in the US. Usually the terms of service of video hosting sites will require lawsuits to be brought in the home county of the company (probably somewhere in Delaware or California for Facebook and Google), and they're likely the offending party here (since Sony files through Facebook and Google, and those companies are the ones who're imposing a terms of service that prohibits uploading "copyrighted" materials), so it is not at all clear one could bring a small claims suit against Sony in your local county. If fact, it seems unlikely, based on my understanding of the law.

I wish it were possible, but I don't know that a county court would consider itself to have jurisdiction in such a case.

If you live in an "insignificant" country it is possible Sony as no presence and so your win won't get you anything. However in the US or most of Europe Sony has enough presence that some part of them will have to pay.

I said "county" not country; you're having a different conversation. We're discussing small claims court at the county level. You don't sue someone in "United States court", you sue them in a county court, usually in the county where the matter being sued over happened, but sometimes the appropriate jurisdiction is the home county of the person or company you're suing (if it's not the same as where the matter took place).

But, it doesn't really answer the question. The agreement between Facebook or YouTube and the uploader definitely requires suits be brought in the jurisdiction of the company (so, Delaware, probably, but maybe California). Sony is using Facebook or Google to do their dirty work in these cases...so, who can you sue and where? I don't think it's at all clear that Sony could be sued in a local small claims court for a matter like this, though I would like for them to be.

Small claims judges in the US are generally supposed to follow precedent, but they don't make precedent. Regardless, in most cases a small claims case can be appealed to a regular circuit court and receive a de novo (completely new) review. (of course, for a corporation, that means hiring an attorney...)

"...And if a takedown notice is wrong, a counter-notice can be sent by someone explaining that they own the work or that it’s not infringement..."

I think "if a takedown notice is wrong" - counternotice need to be sent back with a mandatory bill to pay to compensate for effort of receiving party to prove that takedown notice is invalid.
This will curb down this BS practice of frivolous opportunistic notices.

Some of the time, yeah. It seems a lot better for all of us to front theses costs of government operation rather than foisting all of that cost onto people who were unlucky enough to be wronged or wrongly sued, by no fault of their own.

This isn't a legal takedown notice though, it's facebook's own system to keep the record producers happy. They can do this with impunity because facebook/google's system is designed to help them takedown without having to go through legal notices, which i suspect would have to be filed by a human atleast.

The best part is that the DMCA theoretically has provisions to protect you against fraudulent claims, but no platform holder implements them. You can get absolutely blanketed by fraudulent DMCA notices and you have no recourse because companies like Google refuse to provide you any way to sue the person who's violating the law to harass you, and the companies don't make any attempt to filter out fraudulent notices.

Some random kid in Iowa could cost you thousands of dollars in daily revenue for weeks (while you wait for your dmca'd content to come back up) and you have no recourse because the law doesn't have any teeth.

Technical solutions to this seem to be hindered by issues that affect other secure systems, such as: how do you know who first published something (trusted/reliable time stamping servers?), and how do you know it’s the same content?

As such, I suspect the best system is “hire a bunch of humans to check”. And that’s expensive, which is fine because it should be. These companies try to completely decimate online publications just because it might infringe on their precious properties, and that needs to be a massive cost to deter frivolous takedown notices.

It’s kind of amazing that sites so rapidly reached the point of just insta-killing potentially infringing content with no evidence. That has surely crushed some up-and-coming artists who probably said “screw it” after having their platform taken out from under them by mistake.

That is assuming that false positives for small artists are something that the big EU publishers worry about. They don't. Destroying the public domain and indie works is acceptable collateral damage for the politicians and a desired secondary effect for the publishers. The copyright filters will work exactly as designed.

No, its not even a single bit outlandish, it is the normal procedure how cooperations operate that are too big to be affected by markets or laws. Google, and Facebook are big enough to have a virtual monopoly in their respective domains, so the logic of markets doesn't apply to them anymore. They are also big enough to brazenly ignore certain laws, soley based on the size of their legal departments -- they might be successfully sued in some instances, but it doesn't really matter in the big picture, as long as the average joe is deterred from taking action ("they have so much money for lawyers, you don't have a chance").

These conditions make actions like this not only "not outlandish" but outright reasonable (as seen from the logic of the cooperation). If the system that encourages this behavior doesn't change, the cooperations certainly won't act any different.

This seems perverse in the context of the copyright legislation being discussed in the EU today.

On one hand, rights holders can indiscriminately send out takedown notices to any they suspect of infringing, and the burden is then placed on the poster to prove that it's OK. On the other hand, sites will be required to police all posts, just in case something infringing is posted.

So #1 - it's OK for the rights holders' bots to be inaccurate, but sites will be punished if theirs are.

and #2 - all responsibilities accrue away from the rightsholders. They get all the rights, but have none of the responsibility or burden for (accurately) watching over those rights.

I don't think I want to live with a legal system that claims that my performance (as a human player) of someone else's sheet music is somehow bound by copyright. I draw that line at recorded performances, wherein, say, the orchestra might have reproduction rights to their recording of a public domain work.

I think if the law is any more strict, things like covers wouldn't be able to exist legally, and looooots of genuinely entertaining small-time youtube entertainers that develop their talents by singing or playing covers would suddenly be under legal fire. Even a complete novice can sing along to something on the radio, so trying to claim that they shouldn't be allowed to do so fails my smell test.

Covers exist because of intra-music-industry rules: so-called "mechanical licensing". Arrangements and original compositions are very much subject to copyright...so this is the world you're living in, I'm afraid.

If you write down an original song in a score, then you have copyright for that song, including performances of that song. This is actually true for any time an original song is first placed in a fixed medium, so if you record a song but don't write it down, then the rules are the same.

If you make a novel arrangement for a public domain song, then you have copyright for that specific arrangement, including performances of that song.

If you transcribe a public domain song, then you may have copyright for that transcription (so if someone were to photocopy it, it may infringe), but you do not get any copyright to songs performed from that transcription.

Radio play of a song pays a fee to the owner of the writer's copyright, but not the performer of a song, so David Paich & Jeff Porcaro (or whomever paid them for ownership of the rights) are getting money every time Wheezer's cover of "Africa" plays on the radio, while Wheezer does not get money.

> I don't think I want to live with a legal system that claims that my performance (as a human player) of someone else's sheet music is somehow bound by copyright.

It's going to be hard to find a place where you'd want to live then. I agree that this is a thing that should not exist but it does and the practice is very wide-spread. For an encore: There was a case (I really wished I could find a reference) iirc where a band had sold the rights to a piece and they were then required to pay royalties on a performance of their own creation.

<rant>I'm getting to the crotchety old man stance of - drop copyrights, drop patents, everyone gets paid for [a live performance|first sale of a physical object] and screw all this secondary income bullshit. None of it makes sense and it leaves too many openings for pirates/scumbags/greed to suck money out of the public. </rant>

There's certainly a strong argument for rolling back all the extensions and expansions for patents, copyrights and trademarks, which have been rammed through over the past few decades, by exploitative rights holders.

The alternative is just to ignore it all, and use adequate OPSEC to avoid prosecution. If the system is so totally dominated by monied interests that there's no hope for relief, what else can we do? Just declare independence, and let them pound sand. China and Russia have at times done that, more or less. And we can create our own overlay Internet that can't be coerced or taken down. Or at least, can't be taken down without unacceptable consequences for the commercial Internet. If it comes down to it, overlay routers can spread as malware, and use covert channels, hidden in HD video etc.

I've actually been really curious, does anyone know what kind of algorithm they use to detect similarities?

From what I've read of the tech behind Shazam/SoundHound, I was under the impression that the kind of audio fingerprints produced and indexed relied on the waveform/FFT and rhythmic input being identical, and that a band doing a really accurate cover would never trigger a match because it would be totally different in a million tiny details, the details used for the actual fingerprinting.

But clearly that's not the case here. No two pianists play perfectly alike, so what kind of algorithm is robust enough to match the underlying composition as opposed to the execution of it?

Shazam predates the recent big Deep learning movement iirc. I can conjecture but I feel tech for "understanding" the music has come a long way since Shazam first started. Esp when you see YouTube labelling music in personal recordings.

EDIT: also see [0] for a semi high profile case of a busker getting banned from FB for doing a cover

This just demonstrates how absurd automatic filtering is. It simply equals blind censorship. Usage or presumption of guilt is a common pattern in copyright abuse, from such takedown methods to DRM and other copyright inspired censorship garbage.

So we went from small copyright violators being able to steal without repercussion to large copyright violators being able to steal without repercussions.

Social media went from one extreme to another. Now the big corporations can exploit social media to rob and steal.

This is exactly what it is. Theft by sony and other large companies. Since social media doesn't punish sony and large corporations for abusing the copyright claim system, they will abuse it.

Small copyright violators get suspended if they continue to abuse the system. Each social media platform has a threshold after which your account is banned. Why are corporations not held to the same standard?

If sony knowingly and willingly makes false claims X number of times, then their account should be banned and they should be prevented from making claims. Otherwise, they will claim everything since there are no consequences.

It's sad how social media went from user/people centric to corporate centric in such a short time. Youtube is no longer "you"tube, it's "CNN/HBO/SNL/Late Night Show"tube now.

Is there any reason this can't be done in reverse? (IANAL) Perhaps a small orchestra can put a bunch of stuff online, with copyright of their performance, and then issue takedown notices on all of Sony's versions.

I'm not sure (not a lawyer). In theory, both request should be squashed, and I think there's a serious penalty for knowingly issuing a bullshit request, but i've never heard of the big guys being sanctioned, perhaps they lean on the excuse that their automated tools generate false positives. So you need to put up the content, and then point crappy automated tools at the big boys, maybe. I'm not gonna do it, but if someone who knew what they were doing managed to generate a ton of takedowns at the large providers, in a legally safe manner, it might at least prove a point and generate some press.

Sony must be brought sternly to account for this fiasco. The penalty for this type of mistake should be costly enough that it will never happen again. If the United States will not update the DMCA to sharply penalize false copyright claims, perhaps North Korea should step in and address the situation.